Modello e deformazione. Edgar Allan Poe e l’architettura dell’opacità

Robert Adam is the first architect to play with people habits to a visual control. In his designs we can find the usual succession of independent rooms whose openings are often alternately shifted from middle to corners. Such a strategy is a picturesque gardens’ heritage but in Edgar Allan Poe’s descriptions the deformation of enfilade model looks not bizarre but sick, as if the healthy transparency of house were corrupted by a curse that deposes eye’s power. Labyrinth replaces the perspective; the view abdicates to other senses and human motion is the only answer to dominate space. Poe’s description is still rational and ordered, as if written by a distant witness, but the labyrinthine opacity of his houses -allegory of recesses of human brain- prefigures a number of contemporary approaches to activate and involve body in space, such as Eisenstein’s montage, Benjamin’s concept of intérieur, Loos’ introvert and peripatetic residences and other contemporary architects strategy to involv